Why smart businesses are moving their data out of the city

Businesses’ IT infrastructures are continually expanding in their pursuit to keep pace with modern business. If your data is on-premise, particularly in a city location with sky-high charges for office space, this comes at a significant cost.

Only a few years ago, this would have been a real headache for organisations who believed that the only way to keep their data secure and resilient was to have it on-premise. Every time they expanded, they’d have been left with an expensive bill for upgrading their facilities and renting more square footage.

Increasingly however, this is no longer the case. We find that many businesses now fully understand that off-premise options like colocation can provide them with the security and reliability they need. They are reassured, for example, by services like ours which provide stringent multi-level access controls, built-in resilience and key accreditations that support the compliance and statutory requirements of clients who need higher than average security arrangements.

One area that often isn’t fully considered however is options concerning location, which often bypasses a real cost-saving opportunity - especially for businesses based in popular cities. By limiting your evaluation to providers on your doorstep, you limit both your choice and the amount that you’re likely to save because city providers will share the same real-estate cost issues. With today’s connectivity options, and well-connected road network as well as good transport links there really isn’t the need to restrict yourself in terms of area; particularly when you consider the potential improvements in both security and costs.

Reducing costs, improving security and gaining more options when it comes to partners aren’t the only benefits associated with considering colocation:

Top reasons for choosing colocation

There really are tons of benefits that you can realise by opting for colocation. You can easily move from a CAPEX to an OPEX model, for example. You can free up valuable real-estate. You can avoid unforeseen costs related to maintenance bills or breakdown issues. You can also consolidate ongoing running costs with one bill for everything including power, space, connectivity and security.

Above all of this however, what organisations most appreciate when they move to a colocation model is the management problem that it relieves. After all, your data centre isn’t just somewhere to store your data and keep it safe; it’s much more than that these days. Data centres are now the facility that centralises your organisation's IT operations and the equipment, networked computers, servers and data that underpin your entire business. Or, as IDC puts it, “the datacenter and server rooms/closets are no longer just the places where organizations house their IT assets. The datacenter must serve as the primary point of engagement and information exchange with employees, partners, and customers in today's interconnected world.”

Being responsible for your data centre can be a time consuming and stressful headache, but if you opt for the right kind of service provider you’ll find that’s taken away. At Datum for example, we take a service-enhanced approach to colocation provision that supports you at every stage; we give each of our clients a designated client service manager, ensuring that they are kept fully informed about the performance of their equipment and the facility in which it sits at all times. In addition, we provide Data Centre Engineering, Connectivity, Break-Fix and Workplace Recovery services to reassure you that everything is taken care of.

Overall, this means that opting for colocation is not just a way of solving capacity and storage issues when you’ve outlived your old data centre. It’s a way of improving and enhancing the way you manage your vital data centre operations for the long term good of your business – and an opportunity to reduce costs by moving your data out of the city.

Making the move

If you would like to find out more about the experience of migrating towards colocation, this research from IDG provides valuable insights from data centre and IT decision makers who have been there and done it before. We also have a digital transformation guide which can help you decide how to begin your project, breaking it down into phases and talking you through the best approach.

If you would like to discuss the best place to process, store & distribute your data and learn more about the benefits, contact us today. Or for a simple quote to understand how much money you could save, simply email us at info@datum.co.uk.